BATON ROUGE, La. -- The Civil Service Commission is considering a proposal to suspend pay raises for more than 61,000 rank-and-file state government workers next year, under pressure from state lawmakers and the Jindal administration to curb salary costs.
The proposal, released Tuesday, would strip state agencies of their ability to give 4 percent annual "merit raises" to employees in the 2010-11 budget year that begins July 1, because of the state's ongoing budget problems.
"These difficult and challenging times call for fiscal prudence and shared sacrifice among all of us who serve our fellow citizens," says the proposal sent out to state agency chiefs and posted on the commission's Web site.
The seven-member commission will consider the idea at a special meeting Friday.
Workers deemed "classified" under the Department of Civil Service would be affected by any ban on merit raises. The proposal also would urge state officials to enact a similar pay raise ban for their political appointees, called "unclassified" workers.
Commission officials didn't return a call for comment Tuesday about the proposal.
Gov. Bobby Jindal's top lawyer, Stephen Waguespack, said the governor didn't request the suspension of the raises, but he supports the idea.
"It seems like a sensible step to us, given our current fiscal challenges, so that we can preserve essential state services," Waguespack said.
Jindal's budget recommendation for next year doesn't include extra money for state agency pay raises. But without a ban from the Civil Service Commission, government workers could still get salary boosts if agency chiefs can scrape together the money on their own.
Several lawmakers who made a failed effort last year to get rid of the raises have complained that state employees shouldn't get pay increases while departments are cutting services to Louisiana residents and eliminating programs.
Last year, the Civil Service Commission refused to back a proposal that would have suspended the 4 percent merit raises for classified workers for the current budget year. However, more than 24,000 workers didn't get the raises after several agencies received permission over the year from the civil service department
to withhold salary increases to avoid worker layoffs.
The idea of a ban has prompted angry outcries from state workers who said the raises were based on annual evaluations. They said removing those raises would harm morale and take away the ability to recruit and retain low-paid workers.
The raises have been near-automatic in many departments over the years.
The Jindal administration and lawmakers have pushed to replace the 4 percent raises with a sliding scale of salary increases tied to performance. Any replacement system requires approval from the governor and the Civil Service Commission, however, and Jindal has rejected both proposals submitted by the panel, saying they don't provide enough flexibility to department heads.
(Copyright 2010 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
